LABOR: April Thaw

The soft-coal dispute, frozen by John Lewis’ gruesome “memorial” strike, melted this week like an April thaw. Lewis’ miners, losing millions of dollars in wages and gaining not a thing, had been drifting back. Secretary of the Interior Julius (“Cap”) Krug had thrown responsibility for mine safety right back at Lewis himself. Then Lewis’ old nemesis, Justice T. Alan Goldsborough, melted the last block of ice.

The judge ruminatively decided that Lewis’ union might still have to pay the whole $3,500,000 contempt fine, which Goldsborough had slapped on last December, if Lewis did not behave himself and show that he was acting “in good faith.” The union had only been required so far to cough up $700,000 of it. The judge would wait and see how Lewis and the miners behaved themselves during the next few weeks.

Lewis did not wait long, after that. His order went out to his miners to go back. The Government announced that it would send undercover FBI agents into the coal fields to check up on their good faith.